Safari 4 how-to: Top Sites Browser in a nutshell

Ars dives right into Safari's new features with full how-to tips. First up? …

As you're probably well aware at this point, Apple released a public beta of Safari 4 this morning, and Ars gave it a bit of a runthrough to check out what's new so far. Safari 4's Top Sites Browser probably represents its splashiest and most appealing new feature. The browser offers a visual wall of your most frequently visited Web addresses, with a thumbnail preview of each site. Just click on any item to jump to the page in question. But there's a lot more to your Top Sites wall than first appears. Here's a quick run-down of the Top Sites browser and how you can get the most from this new Safari 4 feature.

Opening the Top Sites wall

You can ask Safari to browse your Top Sites several ways. The easiest involves clicking the new Top Sites icon, found just to the right of the bookmarks browser in the bookmarks bar. This icon looks like a 4 by 3 grid of small squares. When clicked, it opens the Top Sites in your current browser window.

Clicking the icon is just one way to select this new feature. You can also open Top Sites by typing Command-Shift-1 or choosing History > Show Top Sites.

To control whether the icon appears in the Bookmarks bar, open Preferences (Command-,) and select the Bookmarks tab. A new checkbox appears in this preferences tab allowing you to toggle the Top Sites icon on and off.

Using the browser

Navigating to pages couldn't be easier. When you visually identify which page you want to visit, just click it. It zooms into place and updates to the current site. When you're finished viewing a page, click the Top Sites icon to return back to the browser. The white star on the blue background behind a curl that adorns some of the icons in the display indicate pages whose content has updated, offering instant identification of new content.

Editing the Top Sites presentation

Apple offers several customization options that allow you to control your Top Sites display. Here is a quick run-down of those features:

Click Edit to enter edit mode. Click Done to return after making changes.

In edit mode, you can choose from Small (24 top sites), Medium (12 sites), and Large (6 sites) presentations. The more sites you choose to display, the smaller each thumbnail becomes; at the same time, you can keep track of more sites at one time so there's a detail/flexibility trade-off.

Click the Pushpin icon on each thumbnail to lock that site into your display at a given position. Click X to remove it from your top sites list.

Drag any thumbnail to another position to order your sites as desired. The other thumbnails will scoot out of the way to make room. Any item you move automatically is push-pinned into place. Safari (reasonably) assumes that if you are taking the trouble to move that thumbnail, you probably want it to stick where you've placed it.

While in edit mode, you can drag the icon from the address bar of any open window and drop it into place on the Top Sites wall. (Thanks JW1)

Entering History Mode

Safari 4 lets you browse your history just as beautifully as your top sites. To enter history mode, just click in the search box at the bottom right of the Top Sites screen. Instantly, Safari updates your browser window into the Coverflow-based visual History browser. Here are some ways you can use this browser.

Click any page in the Coverflow presentation to bring it to the front. Click again to open that page in the browser.

Click on the background to return to Top Sites mode. This includes any black background that is not part of a page.

Use the scroller at the bottom of the screen to navigate quickly through your entire history. The arrows at each end of the scroller move you one step at a time, either forward or backwards through your history.

Unlike the iPhone, you cannot swipe left or right in this presentation.

Enter a search phrase in the text box in the lower-right corner to filter your history stack. Safari matches the text you enter against the pages and retains only those pages that match the text you enter. As you'd expect with Safari, the search matches both the Web address and the page title.

Clicking the Clear History button does exactly what you'd expect. Choose whether to clear just your history or to include the top site page rankings as well. Click Clear to confirm or Cancel to return without clearing your history.

Many of these same history browsing features are available in the updated Bookmarks browser. You can access those features via History > Show All History. That option takes you to the Bookmarks but it will not take you to the full-browser Top Sites > History mode shown here.